Mauer, Marc
2010: “The Impact of Mandatory Minimum Penalties in Federal Sentencing,” appearing in the journal Judicature, argues that these mandatory sentencing policies have not improved public safety but have exacerbated existing racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The piece is taken from my testimony earlier this year to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

At the heart of the current Palestinian-Israeli struggle lies the question of territorial partition and the establishment of sovereignty. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority negotiated interim borders, but new permanent checkpoints and border closures became severe problems and contributed to the failure of negotiations and the eruption of a new uprising. Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel is about passing through these checkpoints—specifically those that mark the Green Line, the geopolitical border separating the West Bank from Israel proper—and how their existence affects the daily life of West Bank Palestinians.

From Los Angeles and New York to Chicago and Miami, street gangs are regarded as one of the most intractable crime problems facing our cities, and a vast array of resources is being deployed to combat them. This book chronicles the astounding self-transformation of one of the most feared gangs in the United States into a social movement acting on behalf of the dispossessed, renouncing violence and the underground economy, and requiring school attendance for membership.

Compiled by three leading experts in the psychological, sociological, and criminal justice fields, this volume addresses timely questions from an eclectic range of positions. The product of a landmark conference on gangs, Gangs and Society brings together the work of academics, activists, and community leaders to examine the many functions and faces of gangs today. Analyzing the spread of gangs from New York to Texas to the West Coast, the book covers such topics as the spirituality of gangs, the place of women in gang culture, and the effect on gangs of a variety of educational programs and services for at-risk youth. The final chapter examines the “gang-photography phenomenon” by looking at the functions and politics of different approaches to gang photography and features a photographic essay by Donna DeCesare, an award-winning journalist.

The Police and the Ghetto by John L. Cooper discusses the role of the police in the ghetto as a means of explaining the overall role of the black ghetto in American society, and the general role of the police in a policed society. The subject of police-community relations, which essentially refers to the role of the police in urban, black ghettos, has been a source of much government and public concern since the explosive 1960’s. During that decade, it appeared as though the forces of anarchy were marching from the ghetto-rising crime rates, the Black Panthers, and the urban riots. The police became society’s first line of defense against this “internal subversion.” In this light, what should be the police role in the ghetto? Indeed, what has always been the police role in the ghetto? The ghetto is one of our society’s premiere social institutions, and the police are its best -known attendants.

Ek, AuliRace and Masculinity in Contemporary American Prison Narratives,Routledge, 2005

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States. Prison narratives provide an exceptional source for the study of minority positions or discourses of otherness in U.S. culture. Particularly in the discourses of the U.S. criminal justice system, politics, and the visual media, criminals are represented as the other, from the perspectives of race, sexuality, and moral inferiority. For the first time, this book puts various subgenres of prison narratives into a dialogue, in order to demonstrate a polar dichotomy in the institutional and public discourses of criminality.

In recent years there has been an attempt by activists, service providers, and feminists to think about violence against women in more inclusive ways. In Knowing What We Know, activist and sociologist Gail Garfield argues that this effort has not gone far enough and that in order to understand violence, we must take the lived experiences of African American women seriously. Doing so, she cautions, goes far beyond simply adding voices of black women to existing academic and activist discourses, but rather, requires a radical shift in our knowledge of these women’s lives and the rhetoric used to describe them. Bringing together a series of life-history interviews with nine women, this unique study urges a departure from established approaches that position women as victims of exclusively male violence. Instead, Garfield explores what happens when women’s ability to make decisions and act upon those choices comes into conflict with cultural and social constraints. Chapters explore how women experience racialized or class-based violence, how these forms of violence are related to gendered violence, and what these violations mean to a woman’s sense of identity.

Despite the popular perception that genetic explanations of the causes of crime are new, biological determinism dates back to the birth of criminology, and the ideas of the man widely regarded as its founder, Cesare Lombroso. His 1876 work, Criminal Man, drew on Darwin to propose that most lawbreakers were throwbacks to a more primitive level of human evolution–identifiable by their physical traits, such as small heads, flat noses, large ears, and the like. While these ideas had a wide influence, their origins were very much in a specific time and place–the political, economic, and social history of modern Italy. Gibson shows that understanding the development of Lombroso’s thinking is much more complicated than merely pinning his ideas onto the left-right political spectrum; he influenced socialists and fascists, lawyers and doctors, policemen and social workers alike. In the end, she argues for a more subtle interpretation of his theories, emphasizing that Lombroso himself acknowledged the multifaceted nature of criminal behavior.

In a sweeping, cogent indictment of the “war on drugs,” Gordon argues that our prohibitionist, punitive drug policies escalate violence in poor communities but contribute little to the reduction of drug abuse. Drug control policy, she maintains, in a vehicle for conservatives’ fear and antagonisms toward the “dangerous classes”—minorities, youth, immigrants, liberals—whom it helps to marginalize. The core of this report consists of five cases of drug politics, including the recriminalization of marijuana possession in Alaska and the emergence of a congressional consensus supporting the death penalty for drug kingpins. This work challenges both prohibitionists and legalizers to go beyond entrenched positions for ways to treat drug abuse in its full social and medical dimensions.

Crime is one of the major challenges to any new democracy. Violence often increases after the lifting of authoritarian control, or in the aftermath of regime change. But how can a fledgling democracy fight crime without violating the fragile rights of its citizens? In Transformation and Trouble, accomplished theorist and criminal justice scholar Diana Gordon critically examines South Africa’s efforts to strike the perilous balance between democratic participation and social control. South Africa has made great progress in pursuing the Western ideals of participatory justice and due process. Yet Gordon finds that popular concerns about crime have fostered the growth of a punitive criminal justice system that undermines the country’s rights-oriented political culture. Transformation and Trouble calls for South Africa to reaffirm its commitment to public empowerment by reforming its criminal justice system—an approach, she argues, that would strengthen the country’s new democracy.

Green, Charles and Basil WilsonThe Struggle for Black Empowerment in New York City: Beyond the Politics of PigmentationMcGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992

All across Black America there has been a resounding call for political empowerment. The authors envisage black empowerment not as an attempt by blacks to monopolize or exploit power but rather as a process through which they are equal partners in decision making. Covering the period from the turn of the century to the present, this study examines the struggle by blacks in the nation’s largest metropolis, New York City, to achieve political parity with whites. New York City is at a critical juncture in its political history and it is the authors’ objective in this study to provoke thought and to assist this gargantuan city in its age-old quest for its own humanity.

The question at the turn f the 21st century is, has the stain of race-based unfairness been eliminated? In this compelling and important book, a criminal justice professor and former prosecutor argues that it has not, that African Americans continue to suffer significant disparities with regard to law enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing. Race, Crime and Punishment takes a hard look at one of the most explosive issues in America today. Its disturbing picture of a society still divided along racial lines will challenge readers to think about fundamental issues of justice, fairness, and equality under the law.

In Policing and Minority Communities,Dr. Delores Jones-Brown and Dr. Karen Terry, along with other authors, examine the everyday interactions that lead to tensions between the police and members of minority communities. Particular attention is given to the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in police encounters. Recurrent problems existing between police and minority communities are examined from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Most importantly, several innovative techniques, some of which have already proved successful, are suggested for bridging the gap between the two groups.

In March 1931, Clarence Norris, a self-described hobo, and eight other black men were arrested in Paint Rock, Alabama, and charged with raping two white girls who were also hoboes on the train he was riding. The one day trial of the nine men, better known as the “Scottsboro Boys” resulted in conviction and the death sentence despite a paucity of evidence. Though later pardoned, Norris spent 13 years in jail. (He died in 1989.)Clarence Norris’s description of his arrest, trial and sentencing is both tragic and inspirational. His letters to his family, attorneys and supporters show his spirit as he struggled against a biased judicial system. A lengthy 1980 interview with Norris is supplemented by contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial, articles by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Alabama Appeals Court Judge James E. Horton, and legal opinions of the defendants’ attorney, Samuel S. Leibowit.

In March 1931, Clarence Norris, a self-described hobo, and eight other black men were arrested in Paint Rock, Alabama, and charged with raping two white girls who were also hoboes on the train he was riding. The one day trial of the nine men, better known as the “Scottsboro Boys” resulted in conviction and the death sentence despite a paucity of evidence. Though later pardoned, Norris spent 13 years in jail. (He died in 1989.)Clarence Norris’s description of his arrest, trial and sentencing is both tragic and inspirational. His letters to his family, attorneys and supporters show his spirit as he struggled against a biased judicial system. A lengthy 1980 interview with Norris is supplemented by contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial, articles by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Alabama Appeals Court Judge James E. Horton, and legal opinions of the defendants’ attorney, Samuel S. Leibowit.

Focusing on the years of the Reconstruction, this volume examines the actions of the Ku Klux Klan between the years of 1865 and 1899. It explores how the organization sponsored and promoted violence against former slaves, and how that violence eventually led to the formation of armed defensive units, which in some instances engaged in retaliatory action. The author considers both the history and the sociology behind these events, recognizing the attempts of both sides to build a society that reflected their own sense of justice and morality. Appendices provide excerpts from a variety of primary sources including contemporary newspaper articles, correspondence and personal diaries.

Although countless authors have examined the verdicts handed down by juries, the damages they awarded, and the implications that jury decisions have, Juries and Politics is the first book of its kind to examine the jury from a political perspective. This “deeper look” at the issues that lie beyond newspaper headlines reveals what it is that leads jurors to the conclusions they reach. Levine’s modern study of jury behavior and its impact on society is enlightening and valuable for anyone with an interest in understanding and improving the American jury system.

The representation of African American women is an important issue in the overall study of how women are portrayed in film, and has received serious attention in recent years. Traditionally, “women of color,” particularly African American women, have been at the margins of studies of women’s on-screen depictions—or excluded altogether. This work focuses exclusively on the sexual objectification of African American women in film from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Critics of the negative sexual imagery have long speculated that control by African American filmmakers would change how African American women are depicted. This work examines sixteen films made by males both white and black to see how the imagery might change with the race of the filmmaker.

Children, Race and Power will speak strongly to those concerned about twentieth-century race-relations; it is a book from which present-day policy-makers, mental-health professionals, social workers, and educational administrators can learn much. Contrasting the Clark’s vision for the Northside Center with the constraints against it, it shows the profound inequality of social and material resources in Harlem that even a groundbreaking institution such as Northside could not offset.

In a collection of compelling contributions to the study of the nexus between race, crime, and justice, noted scholars in the field critique many long-held assumptions and myths about race, challenging criminal justice policymakers to develop new and effective strategies for dealing with the social problems such misunderstandings create. In sections devoted to criminological theory, law enforcement, courts and the law, juvenile delinquency, and gender, contributors endeavor to dispel myths about African-American involvement in the criminal justice system. Each contributor challenges both the reader and the criminal justice system to develop meaningful strategies for addressing the racism that still pervades our system of justice.

The U.S. Census Bureau has proclaimed Latinos/as as the “largest minority community” in the United States. Yet, biases and unequal treatment still plague this growing population, and its struggles to secure equal rights and justice remain largely unknown. Linking international and domestic dimensions of the Latino/a presence in the United States, this book explores the historical and contemporary Latino/a experience of discrimination and economic and social injustice. Using Latino/a viewpoints, author Jose Luis Morin provides a deeper understanding of pressing issues within these communities, giving insights into the elusiveness of equality and fairness for Latinos/as in the United States. Morin also offers ideas on how to expose and reduce bias and other inequities within the justice system and the greater society.

Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail looks carefully at just that issue. Constant negative headlines call into question the ability of U.S. law enforcement to manage itself effectively in a democratic, diverse society. By analyzing a variety of cases, the author shows how crises occur regularly along common structural and cultural fault lines in police agencies at every level of government. The exploration of what handicaps the law enforcement agency goes far beyond “bureaucratic bungling” to examine deep-seated structural and cultural elements of organization. Symptoms such as institutional racism, sexual harassment, and racial profiling are seen as outgrowths of structural-cultural characteristics in law enforcement organizations whose power is often independent of larger social forces. Why Law Enforcement Organizations Failprovides tools for spotting malignant individuals, highlighting perverse incentives, isolating and neutralizing deviant cultures, recognizing policy inertia, and confronting bankrupt philosophies.

Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail looks carefully at just that issue. Constant negative headlines call into question the ability of U.S. law enforcement to manage itself effectively in a democratic, diverse society. By analyzing a variety of cases, the author shows how crises occur regularly along common structural and cultural fault lines in police agencies at every level of government. The exploration of what handicaps the law enforcement agency goes far beyond “bureaucratic bungling” to examine deep-seated structural and cultural elements of organization. Symptoms such as institutional racism, sexual harassment, and racial profiling are seen as outgrowths of structural-cultural characteristics in law enforcement organizations whose power is often independent of larger social forces. Why Law Enforcement Organizations Failprovides tools for spotting malignant individuals, highlighting perverse incentives, isolating and neutralizing deviant cultures, recognizing policy inertia, and confronting bankrupt philosophies.

In Detecting the Nation Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential both to public acceptance of the newly organized police force in early Victorian Britain and to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority. She supports this claim through reading such masters of the genre as Godwin, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle in relation to narratives of crime and empire such as James Mill’s History of British India, narratives about Thuggee, and selected writings of Kipling and Buchan. Detective fiction and writings more specifically related to the imperial project, such as political tracts and adventure stories, were inextricably interrelated during this time.

Constituting fewer than 15% of the nation’s police officers, women have found it especially difficult to rise through the ranks and achieve higher posts. Here, those few women who have made it to the top–about 1% of the chiefs and sheriffs in American policing–share their stories and describe the challenges they faced as they rose to their positions. They are unique groundbreakers who have managed to breach the brass ceiling. Here is the fascinating story of how individual women are setting a pace for other women in one of the most male-dominated public service fields in America, second only behind firefighting in its image as a place where few women have successfully negotiated careers to the top.

This groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class. Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.

Consisting of original essays commissioned for the volume from leading scholars, as well as a number of recently published, important articles in the field, this anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which women affect and are affected by crime and the criminal justice system. Analysis is grounded in feminist scholarship and activism, and anchored in perspectives that orient women’s crime, imprisonment, victimization, and survival in a race, class, and gender perspective.

This book brings together outstanding feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines (including sociology, criminology, anthropology, history, etc.), who describe, explain, and challenge the criminal justice system and its treatment of women. It provides a comprehensive overview of how women both affect and are affected by crime and the criminal justice system. This book is unique in its attempt to critically evaluate the ways in which systematic interrelating social structures of class, race, and gender impact on women offenders caught in the criminal justice system, women victims and survivors of male violence, and women who work throughout the criminal justice system. The book is appropriate for upper level undergraduates as well as graduate students. It is chock full of the latest research findings on many aspects of women offenders, victims and workers in the criminal justice system.

Women of all racial\ethnic backgrounds and minority men have been hailed as the major beneficiaries of the expansion in political, economic, and employment opportunities of the 1960s and 1970s. The author uses data derived from a twenty year span of census material to provide a thorough analysis of gender and race segregation throughout the professional occupations in the U.S. during this period of massive social change. She makes clear the advances achieved by all groups-men and women, black and white-during this period of economic expansion, as well as insightfully evaluating the differential advantage of white men against all other race/gender groups. At the same time, Professor Sokoloff provides compelling evidence challenging several myths, such as that of the “two-fer” myth, whereby black women are said to benefit two-fold from their race and gender statuses from affirmative action.

African Americans have experienced life under the rule of law in quite different contexts from those of whites, and they have written about those differences in poems, songs, stories, autobiographies, novels, and memoirs. This book examines the tradition of American law as it appears in African American literary life, from pre-Revolutionary murder trials to gangsta rap. The experience, and the critique it produces, change our pictures of both American law and African American literature. Suggs presents a radical rereading of nineteenth-and twentieth-century African American literature as an ongoing critique of American law. Locating the fundamental ground of what he calls “the classical African American narrative” in a textual interaction between black literature and American legal history, Suggs examines both canonical and rarely discussed works to show the complex interactions among Romanticism, Modernism, law, and African American literary life.

A lively array of selections from the earliest recorded convict autobiographies, examining crimes, arrests and convictions, punishments inflicted, survival techniques, and spiritual awakenings. Hard labor in coal mines, whippings, solitary confinement in bare unheated cells, water torture, and iron maidens—just a few of the punishments meted out to these pioneers of prison literature.

As our justice system has embarked upon one of the greatest social experiments of our time-the expansive use of prisons as our response to crime-we have forgotten the iron law of imprisonment: they all come back. In 2002 alone, more than 630,000 individuals left federal and state prisons-compared with the 150,000 who made a similar journey 30 years ago. Sadly, in the intense political debate over America’s punishment policies, the impact of these returning prisoners on families and communities has been largely overlooked. In But They All Come Back, Jeremy Travis continues his pioneering work on prisoner reentry. He describes the new realities of punishment in America and explores the nexus of returning prisoners with seven policy domains: public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes a new architecture for our criminal justice system, organized around five principles of reentry that will encourage change and spur innovation. It is a Herculean synthesis and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in prisoner reentry and social justice.

In the American legal system valid witness-testimony is supposed to be invariable and unchanging, so defense attorneys highlight seeming inconsistencies in victims’ accounts to impeach their credibility. This book offers an examination of how and why victims of domestic violence might seem to be ‘changing their stories,’ in the criminal justice system, which may leave them vulnerable to attack and criticism. Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant versions of violence investigates the discourse of protective order interviews, where women apply for court injunctions to keep abusers away. In these encounters, two different versions of violence, each influenced by a range of ethnolinguistic, intertextual and cultural factors, are always produced. This ethnography of Latina women narrating violence suggests that before victims even get to trial, their testimony involves much more than merely telling the truth. This book provides a unique look at pre-trial testimony as a collaborative and dynamic social and cultural act.

Love, Sorrow, and Rage gives powerful voice to women like Nora Gaines and Dixie Register, who tell us what it’s like to live on the streets of New York, how it feels to lose your mind, about the taste of crack cocaine, and the sweetness of friendship. In this novel-like narrative of homelessness and hope, poor women share a table, their meals, and their intimacies with author Alisse Waterston. On the pages of this impassioned ethnography, Waterston puts mythic, demonized bag-ladies to rest, and in so doing, brings ordinary women to life. From drug addiction and the spread of AIDS to the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S., the topics in this book get front-page coverage in daily newspapers across the country. Waterston seeks to understand, to explain, and to solve the human crisis that surrounds us. Towards this end, she challenges us to look at the ways in which our society and the workings of our political, economic, and popular culture contribute to the suffering experienced by our most vulnerable citizens.

In this book, Alisse Waterston reveals the economic, political, and ideological forces that shape the nature of street-addict life. Disputing the view that hard-core, low-income drug users are social margins situated in deviant subcultures, the author dispels popular images of the mythic, dark dope fiend haunting our city streets. Using dramatic, first-person accounts from New York City addicts, Waterston analyzes their position in the social structure, the kind of work—both legal and illegal—they perform, and their relations with family, friends, and lovers. She presents a moving account of daily life from the addict’s point of view and demonstrates how addicts are structurally vulnerable to the larger sociocultural system within which they live.

Dirks, D. and Rice, S.K. (2004). Dining while Black: Racial rituals and the Black American restaurant experience. In R. Coates (ed.), Race and ethnicity: Across time, space and discipline: Studies in critical social sciences. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.